Having looked at how the modular by design approach impacted broadcast television, let’s now look at its impact on cable TV. The FCC and the cable TV industry recently came head to head when it comes to a la carte pricing . The concept of a la carte pricing is that consumers would be able to buy any TV channel in a model instead of being forced into buying a bundle of shows as part of the standard offering. The cable industry contends that a la carte pricing is bad because it will wreak havoc with the economic model of the cable business. It’s true that it will do so as large media companies like Viacom and Walt Disney currently force cable operators to broadcast their less popular channels in exchange for the rights to broadcast their top properties, like MTV or ESPN and will no longer be able to do so if a la carte becomes a reality. They will also have a harder time selling an audience package to their advertisers as there will no longer be any guarantee that buying an ad in a package that reaches MTV and Spike will ensure the same kinds of hits….

A new worm called Hybris has been spreading across computers in Europe, the United States and South America. While it currently carries a non-destructive payload, some Anti Virus developers are worried that its plug-in architecture could turn it into a much more dangerous virus, opening backdoors in computer systems and escalating the war between virus makers and anti-virus developers. First discovered in South America by Kapersky Labs, a Russian anti-virus developer, the worm has spread through email to Europe and the United States at an increasing pace. “Hybris is one of the more common virus we’re seeing right now,” said Brian Kinj, a member of the technical staff at the CERT coordination center. Because it carries a non-destructive payload, the anti-virus community has been split over the threat level the virus represents. In the United States, the Joint Task Force Computer Network Defense, a division of the US department of defense, has upgraded the virus to a high-risk status. Meanwhile, European virus tracker Peter Kruse, of virus112.com, has announced on Usenet that his company was upgrading the virus threat to a medium risk status, due to the recent spread of the virus in Europe. Companies like Symantec and Sophos, however,…